Penultimate break before the university shuts down for the Christmas and New Year period. I'll be on leave until the middle of January. Hong Kong next week for six days, then back in Melbourne to sit on the couch for two weeks, writing and reading novels while the cricket is on in the background. Such is life. I'm reading this and it's absolutely great.
I'm supposed to update an ~180 person contact list by December 30th. Absolutely no desire to do that. But I've got other projects that are more fun to play with over the next few weeks so that's nice.
I don't even have it in me to re-bitch from chat. At this point, I'd support even literal anarchists, libertarians, and nazis if it'd mean I only have to do a tenth of this paperwork. Bargaining stage, hooooo! Anyway. There's an idea we play Pendragon RPG sometime after the New Year's, and... man, the mechanics of this game look bitchin', but I just don't give a toss about who wants to duel and/or bone whom with Picts and Saxons in the background. It should appeal to my Crusader Kings-attuned brain, but there's the rub: I like CK2 because there's freedom and challenge comes from that freedom. If I want to conquer Europe as Taoist Hans and introduce bakagaijins to Confucianism and tea, then I absolutely fucking can (try to) do just that. Hell, I even acquired Carolingian and Attila's bloodline along the way while one of my distant relatives converted to Catholicism out of spite, lived 89 years, and crusaded against me twice, spawning a saintly bloodline in the process. It was a wild ride that could have gone wrong at any point, but it didn't despite the overwhelming odds and everyone hating you for being a foreign infidel. In Pendragon, I can't shake off the feeling you're free to do your little thing, but they're inconsequential because the Legends have to go along the predestined historical way (aka railroading)... and that's just not why I play RPGs? Maybe I'm missing something and it'll turn out awesome, but dang, I'd like to like this game more but currently just don't see how I could. EDIT/Addendum: Otherwise, gonna binge the last season of Lower Decks this weekend. Looks promising. Gf can't stand Shatner's liberal understanding of diction, but maybe I can get her into DS9 next.
Loved the last season of Lower Decks. I've tried other Star Treks and I just couldn't do them but this one was so fun.
I'm willing to go as far as proclaiming Star Trek to be Paramount's Disneyland - you either grew up in it or it's kitschy bullshit. And I grew up in a house with a 2nd-ed concordance.
As someone who grew up with it, that’s what turned me off of it. Back in the day, it was perfectly willing to try new things, to say things about culture and science and ask deep questions about reality and so on. At present, it goes in one of two directions. First you have the Nostalgia Trek, which seems mostly interested in catering to people who like Star Trek as an aesthetic setting. People who like the setting of Guys who Explore Space and Lecture Aliens about Neoliberalism. They like the aliens, the ships, the politics, they like to see their favorite childhood stories and heroes on their TVs. But they have no interest in the ethos of Trek, or even Science Fiction as a genre of fiction. This version in essence is Sci-Fi for people who want to pretend to like sci-fi but hate all the stuff that makes it actually science fiction— the hard science, the philosophical questions about reality and the questions about things that modern Americans take for granted. To them the Federation is America, but in space, and Starfleet is the USA military who are always right and never fail. Second, you have the too-cool-for-school Trek. It’s not any more willing to tweak noses or really shake things up. They just decided they don’t like the old Trek aesthetic and therefore “deconstruct” it, or lampoon it, or “subvert” it in utterly predictable ways. What if … the federation is the bad guys? What if we totally glued teeth all over Klingons for no reason? What if we suddenly discovered the Roger’s and Hammerstein Nebula? Or turned Spock human just before his mother comes to visit. None of this is deep or interesting it’s more like a kid deciding it’s cool to deface a painting.
I would badge this if I could. Our badge economy is collapsing. Wanna see an awesome quote? “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.” - Barbara Broccoli Worthy of note - Ian Fleming died in 1964, a year and change after Dr. No came out. The Living Daylights (1987) was the last Fleming bond, unless you count Casino Royale, which was a direct response to the Bourne movies eating Bond's lunch after Madonna fenced with a North Korean billionaire ice-racer who had a death ray satellite or some shit. Also worthy of note - Cubby Broccoli nuked one business partnership to buy rights to the Bond novels because his existing partner thought they were shit - he was right, by the way. Cubby also dropped Blofeld down a chimney so that he could show his second partner who was boss. The Bond movies have only been just barely based on Fleming's spy since the drop; the whole mess has always been "whatever the Broccolis feel like doing". Likewise, Gene Roddenberry has been dead since 1991 and was an alcoholic sexual predator while alive. The first series was noteworthy for having several brilliant authors contribute and then leave; Next Generation was noteworthy for having several brilliant authors contribute and then leave. DS9, Discovery and the later movies are all Rick Berman, whose principle trait was "he did what Majel Barrett said." That, of course, ran the franchise into the ground faster than you can say "north korean ice racing" so Paramount dragged Kurtzman and Orci into the frame to resurrect the thing but it's very much culture by committee at this point. I think Trek succeeds when it allows accidental brilliance. The more money there is in it, the less room there is for accident.
I’ll agree with almost all of this, although I’m agnostic on the alcoholism. But I think the other huge weakness here is just how “inbred” the entire thing is. There’s a lot of people working on the series who have done almost nothing else. If there’s a way to kill the vision of a scifi series (or really any series) getting a second or third generation of people who have done nothing else is a great way to do it. There’s not really an outside perspective, what exactly can aging trek actors turned directors bring to the series? What can Spock’s son literally raised on the set see here? In all cases, it’s soaked in that vision of what was. And it generally means taking fairly safe routes and going to the familiar, or going for the modern mania for deconstruction where you simply subvert and change things in odd ways just to change them. The Dune book series had the same problem. Brian Herbert simply is not his father. And so you have things that are safer if boring and bland. Or you have Kralizec in which Duncan Idaho teaches computers to share with humans. It’s lost a lot of tge mojo it had. It’s an adventure story now, with no more of that boring philosophy or science or weirdness that made the original story interesting.